Jenny Townes

Week 6 Reading Notes

1. How the material helped

The material this week was quite helpful—easy to read and understand, very informative and well organized. Something that always puzzled was how colors were assigned in HTML. When the code says "font color=orange", does ‘orange’ mean the same thing on every browser? If I type ‘burnt umber’, will that register as a color? The “Colors: Text and Background” explained that ‘simple colors’ represent hexadecimal codes. Thus, typing "font color=orange" means that the text will be the same orange (disregarding personal monitor preference) on every browser.
Dreamweaver is a program I’d always known about but never known exactly what is was or what it did. A few years ago I learned HTML basics and always thought an HTML editor would be really useful—something that could check for formatting errors and the like. It’s good to know that programs that do just that do exist and now I know how to use one.

2. What I didn't understand

I’m not sure how tables of contents work. If your page is easily divided into sections, do you just use the actual section header as the target? What happens if that text is repeated elsewhere in the document?

3. Additional questions

• The first reading mentions a “simple word processor (like Notepad for Windows or Simple Text for the Macintosh) or an online text editor (like pico or ne in Unix)” instead of a more powerful word processor. Is there a specific reason for this, or just that simpler programs are easier to use?
• Why do odd characters confuse the web server?
• In "font face = arial > text < /font ", does it matter which font, or are there a select few, as with color codes?